Terrain Error
Linienstrasse 40, 2nd floor, Apartment 6, Rosa Luxemburg Platz, 06/08/2010 - 06/13/2010
ABOUT
The Artist Pension Trust (APT) in association with Apartment 6/L40 is pleased to present "Terrain Error: Animations from the APT Collection." Representing artists working in Athens, Beijing, Berlin, Bogotá, Glasgow, Los Angeles, Mumbai, and New York, this exhibition provides a curated viewpoint of the cultural diversity of this organization.
Terrain Error has been described as "a dance of natural energies" giving erroneous readings of the needles in all kind of measuring instruments thus disorienting aircrafts, ships or anyone using a common GPS. It’s precisely this disturbing and unsettling quality in the works of the artists exhibited that can redirect established ways of thinking about various aspects of being that led us to choose this title for the exhibition.
In Terrain Error, Loukia Alavanou, Milena Bonilla, Chen Shaoxiong, Erin Cosgrove, Archana Hande, Tommy Hartung, Julia Oschatz, and David Shrigley all use a form of animation to depict some fundamental aspect of the human mindscape.
In 1937, unrestrained story telling in feature length animation films was unleashed with the release of Walt Disney Studio’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. This truly popularized the medium. Stylized, hand-drawn, cartoon figures-in-motion delivered an unparalleled entertainment filled with fantasy and terror—often in service to social, political, and non-secular doctrines.
Especially the American film studios MGM, Universal, Warner Brothers and, of course, the Disney Studios often derived their narratives from fairly tales and moral tropes that promoted pan-Christian values. Notably, many of the most popular narratives were written by the Grimm brothers, filled with characterizations that reinforced stereotypes and class hierarchies. Almost a century later, it is striking how much of this remains in place.
It seems that it remains to the artists and their work to come back to the basic questions in life.
All works are part of the Artist Pension Trust Collection and are courtesy of the artist and Artist Pension Trust.
The Works
Loukia Alvanou’s (Athens, Greece) Wishing Well (2005) uses Disney’s animation of the story of Snow White to explore femininity in terms of desire, dependence, and trauma. Selected sequences from this animations are reframed and digitally manipulated to project a darkly humorous satire on our distorted values of beauty and female roles propagated by film and advertising.
Ceremonia para paisaje homogeneo/ Ceremony for a homogeneous landscape (2009) is Milena Bonilla’s (Bogota, Columbia) commentary on the end of an era defined by romantic notions of landscape and heroes and change. In this short animation the silhouette of a horse and rider—seemingly styled after classic monuments commemorating great men who led and conquered—slowly drops from the sky into a mountain landscape until finally becoming indistinguishable from the black terrain as it transforms into a flat plain.
Banal and predictable, CHEN Shaoxiong’s (Beijing, China) depictions of life in Guangzhou as a series transparent watercolor sketches is centrally framed as a commentary on observation and incident, as is much of Chen’s work. It is a somewhat vague life we lead without much to take note of unless we indulge our emotional and intellectual interests.
In What Manner of Person Art Thou (2004-2008) Erin Cosgrove’s (Los Angeles, CA) protagonists, Elijah Yoder and Enoch Troyer, play out the classic narrative of righteousness and vigilantism as two anachronistic believers who dispense violent justice on those they deem to be evildoers. Four years in the making, his 65-minute film is an indictment of the Bush administration’s policies as well as a simple, moral tale of biblical dimension with a graphic novel twist with Yoder and Troyer as allegorical figures that represent the corruptibility of faith.
Archana Hande’s (Mumbai/Bangalore, India) All is Fair in Magic White (2008-2009) depicts a world divided by the dual strains of urbanization and globalization taking place throughout India today. Using Indian picture-making and decorative techniques, Hande has carved various characters, symbols, icons and sceno-graphic elements from wooden blocks and combines them into rebus-like pictures creating a modern day tale politically charged with the glaring realities of modern day India.
Based on Jacob Brunowski’s BBC documentary of the same title, Tommy Hartung’s (New York City, NY) The Ascent of Man (2009) is a collection of images constructed from hand-built tableaus and original film footage from this 1973 television series. The interleafing of Bronowski’s clips and Hartung’s stop-action animations never quite reads as a cogent sequence of events but rather skips from image to image and idea to idea making for an ambiguous reading of Brunowski’s underlying narrative—humanity’s ascent from proto-ape to modern man—with the mystery of creation entangled in ideas embedded in both godliness and evolution.
In A Poorest Poet (2010), Julia Oschatz’s (Berlin, Germany) performance based video, Oschatz plays a featureless character that performs on a small proscenium, seemingly to an empty theater. As with another recurring protagonist in her work Wesen, a rather sad looking and again featureless cousin of the rabbit, Oschatz’s characters trudge through life surviving small successes and greater failures alike with an inevitability that derives neither joy nor sorrow from either. Often combined with structures built of cardboard or, as in this work, placement of the monitor upside down on a pedestal, we are asked to adjust our perspective to that of the artist and her character.
David Shrigley’s (Glasgow, Scotland) cool, clever, and line-drawn animations take up, over and again, the foibles of human behavior and society. In Ones (2010) a hand reaches into the picture frame with a dice cup. Repeatedly, the cup is shaken tossing out the same roll, ones. Is this extraordinary good luck or a cheat as the hope is for a high roll? It is impossible to know, but throughout the viewer is played, delighted with beating the odds and then gradually frustrated at being stuck with only one outcome.
The Artist Pension Trust (APT) in association with Apartment 6/L40 is pleased to present "Terrain Error: Animations from the APT Collection." Representing artists working in Athens, Beijing, Berlin, Bogotá, Glasgow, Los Angeles, Mumbai, and New York, this exhibition provides a curated viewpoint of the cultural diversity of this organization.
Terrain Error has been described as "a dance of natural energies" giving erroneous readings of the needles in all kind of measuring instruments thus disorienting aircrafts, ships or anyone using a common GPS. It’s precisely this disturbing and unsettling quality in the works of the artists exhibited that can redirect established ways of thinking about various aspects of being that led us to choose this title for the exhibition.
In Terrain Error, Loukia Alavanou, Milena Bonilla, Chen Shaoxiong, Erin Cosgrove, Archana Hande, Tommy Hartung, Julia Oschatz, and David Shrigley all use a form of animation to depict some fundamental aspect of the human mindscape.
In 1937, unrestrained story telling in feature length animation films was unleashed with the release of Walt Disney Studio’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. This truly popularized the medium. Stylized, hand-drawn, cartoon figures-in-motion delivered an unparalleled entertainment filled with fantasy and terror—often in service to social, political, and non-secular doctrines.
Especially the American film studios MGM, Universal, Warner Brothers and, of course, the Disney Studios often derived their narratives from fairly tales and moral tropes that promoted pan-Christian values. Notably, many of the most popular narratives were written by the Grimm brothers, filled with characterizations that reinforced stereotypes and class hierarchies. Almost a century later, it is striking how much of this remains in place.
It seems that it remains to the artists and their work to come back to the basic questions in life.
All works are part of the Artist Pension Trust Collection and are courtesy of the artist and Artist Pension Trust.
The Works
Loukia Alvanou’s (Athens, Greece) Wishing Well (2005) uses Disney’s animation of the story of Snow White to explore femininity in terms of desire, dependence, and trauma. Selected sequences from this animations are reframed and digitally manipulated to project a darkly humorous satire on our distorted values of beauty and female roles propagated by film and advertising.
Ceremonia para paisaje homogeneo/ Ceremony for a homogeneous landscape (2009) is Milena Bonilla’s (Bogota, Columbia) commentary on the end of an era defined by romantic notions of landscape and heroes and change. In this short animation the silhouette of a horse and rider—seemingly styled after classic monuments commemorating great men who led and conquered—slowly drops from the sky into a mountain landscape until finally becoming indistinguishable from the black terrain as it transforms into a flat plain.
Banal and predictable, CHEN Shaoxiong’s (Beijing, China) depictions of life in Guangzhou as a series transparent watercolor sketches is centrally framed as a commentary on observation and incident, as is much of Chen’s work. It is a somewhat vague life we lead without much to take note of unless we indulge our emotional and intellectual interests.
In What Manner of Person Art Thou (2004-2008) Erin Cosgrove’s (Los Angeles, CA) protagonists, Elijah Yoder and Enoch Troyer, play out the classic narrative of righteousness and vigilantism as two anachronistic believers who dispense violent justice on those they deem to be evildoers. Four years in the making, his 65-minute film is an indictment of the Bush administration’s policies as well as a simple, moral tale of biblical dimension with a graphic novel twist with Yoder and Troyer as allegorical figures that represent the corruptibility of faith.
Archana Hande’s (Mumbai/Bangalore, India) All is Fair in Magic White (2008-2009) depicts a world divided by the dual strains of urbanization and globalization taking place throughout India today. Using Indian picture-making and decorative techniques, Hande has carved various characters, symbols, icons and sceno-graphic elements from wooden blocks and combines them into rebus-like pictures creating a modern day tale politically charged with the glaring realities of modern day India.
Based on Jacob Brunowski’s BBC documentary of the same title, Tommy Hartung’s (New York City, NY) The Ascent of Man (2009) is a collection of images constructed from hand-built tableaus and original film footage from this 1973 television series. The interleafing of Bronowski’s clips and Hartung’s stop-action animations never quite reads as a cogent sequence of events but rather skips from image to image and idea to idea making for an ambiguous reading of Brunowski’s underlying narrative—humanity’s ascent from proto-ape to modern man—with the mystery of creation entangled in ideas embedded in both godliness and evolution.
In A Poorest Poet (2010), Julia Oschatz’s (Berlin, Germany) performance based video, Oschatz plays a featureless character that performs on a small proscenium, seemingly to an empty theater. As with another recurring protagonist in her work Wesen, a rather sad looking and again featureless cousin of the rabbit, Oschatz’s characters trudge through life surviving small successes and greater failures alike with an inevitability that derives neither joy nor sorrow from either. Often combined with structures built of cardboard or, as in this work, placement of the monitor upside down on a pedestal, we are asked to adjust our perspective to that of the artist and her character.
David Shrigley’s (Glasgow, Scotland) cool, clever, and line-drawn animations take up, over and again, the foibles of human behavior and society. In Ones (2010) a hand reaches into the picture frame with a dice cup. Repeatedly, the cup is shaken tossing out the same roll, ones. Is this extraordinary good luck or a cheat as the hope is for a high roll? It is impossible to know, but throughout the viewer is played, delighted with beating the odds and then gradually frustrated at being stuck with only one outcome.